Day: September 21, 2016

S&V / Week 2-3 / To be Listened on a Couch with Eyes Closed

| A-M Gallero

oncouch
 

A sound piece made with Regina Cantu de Alba and inspired by Octavia Butler’s short story “Bloodchild.”

With this project, I learned to strip away the pictures that I’m so comfortable with and concentrate on tones and sounds that me and my partner recorded and later edited in Adobe Audition. I used to listen to lots of audio books with my eyes closed and would fall asleep to them. It’s an experience to focus solely on the sounds and to let the blank visual canvas of your mind wander away. And that’s hard to do nowadays when everyone is so plugged into their smart phones and social media.

Listening to the sound piece in the dark with the rest of the class and hearing the feedback was interesting. I definitely was influenced by the sound walk and Pejk Malinovski’s talk. I loved how the sounds took me on a journey and that’s what our intention was with the piece. Collaboration with Lola was also a big pleasure. Her initial interpretation of the story as ‘points of entry vs. the expected’ was our base for the emotional values that we collected in our sounds. And the freedom for both of us to explore and experiment in sound collecting and editing separately was good in combining different perspectives. Then later coming back together to combine our finds and discover things together, like recording interesting sounds in the stairwell with specials mics and chia pudding. This was all key to making a piece that we’re both happy with.

A lesson that I will take for the next sound project is to bring some sort of buffer on the Zoom to cancel out the wind when recording outside or to just take a stick mic instead for cleaner sounds with less distortion.

PCOM/ Week 2 / Electricity Labs and a Switch Project

| A-M Gallero

This week I started to use my Arduino Starter kit to connect the breadboard to the microcontroller and light up my first LED diode. Had a couple hiccups when putting the resistors on the board. There were so many variations of the middle color stripes and ohm values of the resistors. And they are so tiny that it’s hard to distinguish what’s what. Luckily, my starter kit had a book with a very helpful chart on ‘How to Read Resistor Color Codes’ and decipher the math behind it. Another small problem that I ran into when uploading my code in the Arduino application was that I plugged the USB cable from the microcontroller to the wall instead of my laptop. Once I fixed that connection, my LED started blinking.

LED from annemgal on Vimeo.

For this week’s homework of putting together a simple application for switches and LED circuits, I found a sample project of connecting 3 LEDs to a push button switch and used that as the base for the coding and schematics of the assignment.

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My initial idea was to make a little house and use the switches to open a door or light up a window, but it morphed into an idea seeing silhouettes through windows at night. With the base that I had, I wanted to fill the house with LED lights, so I added a couple more LED lights to the board and adjusted the code.

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I then cut black paper silhouettes and taped them to the board in front of the LED lights and constructed a see through building with tracing paper to enclose the lights and paper figures.

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I was contemplating whether to draw black lines for windows, but I liked the cleanness of the white walls without the window and door details.

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And here’s the finished version of the LED Dance Party on a Breadboard.

Dance Party from annemgal on Vimeo.